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Pentium-Based Macs The Future of Apple?
seek3r writes "Found this interesting article on BusinessWeek.com regarding Apple's potential switch to Intel chips. I wonder what the implications this might have for Apple with regards to market share and software support. Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?"
There is a world of difference between using an x86 processor, and using an x86-based PC. I suspect Apple has closely investigated hooking up an x86-64 (or two ;) to a custom motherboard/infrastructure that would solve many of the interrupt/expansion complexities of PCs. For example, they could adopt HyperTransport, which would make multiprocessing affordable, easy to design around and most of all, leading edge, which is important to some people. Remember, Apple is expert at getting a lot out of a little - it would not surprise me if they tied a Hammer to a custom motherboard and created a whole new architecture. And that wouldn't be a bad thing.
But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
Sun, SGI et al realized this years ago. Serious computing is limited not by clock speed of the CPU but by bus and memory bandwidth. That's why Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes. Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
Such a move on Apple's part would complicate matters significantly. Consider that if hardware devices would STILL need mac specific drivers to meet whatever "hardware security" apple uses to make their machines proprietary--Meaning much hardware STILL won't function with OS X, whether it's on top of Intel or a PowerPC proc from Motorola or IBM.
My favorite uninformed reader was this guy:
This guy doesn't understand the term "switch." If he starts off running an Intel PC, and buys an "Intel mac" what has he really changed? Still using the same ancient hardware architecture kludged on top of a 32-bit chip sucking more juice that an a electric battleship.
Who did what now?
The only real advantage of the PPC at the moment is that it lacks a lot of backwards compatibility cruft and, because of its RISC design, consumes less power and spreads less heat. It is a fine notebook CPU (and Apple is a fine notebook manufacturer). But Apple seems to have had no other chance but giving up this advantage by selling its newest line of desktop G4 Macs with dual CPUs, keeping up with Intel at least halfway with such a "hack".
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE
If you said "a clustered array of RAID5 15,000 RPM drives versus a 5400RPM single drive", then that would have made sense, but to use SCSI versus IDE as the big differentiation is just silly: The intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven countless times.
Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes
That's pretty disingenuous: Sun sells systems with tens or hundreds of those "300-400Mhz" processors, disproving your "CPU power doesn't matter" BS. I guarantee you that if Sun weren't sliding behind in the CPU game (it's hard to compete with AMD and Intel with such a small niche market) they'd sell much more powerful CPUs. Instead they compensate by clustering dozens of them together.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
You'd save next to nothing. An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs. Considering that most power PCs have 512MB of RAM (which is virtually never exhausted. Despite having several development tools open, and SQL Server running, and several different browsers, I currently have 370MB free. Adding more memory will merely increase the capacitive load of my PC). Secondly, adding a faster disk only matters if you do tasks which are heavily disk I/O intensive, which the overwhelming majority are not (especially because people have so much memory, and hence disk cache). It's like saying you'll get better video encoding performance by equipping your PC with a faster CD-ROM drive.
This BS "CPUs are faster than we'll ever need" nonsense is as tired of an argument as it was a decade ago when contrarians were assuring us that a 386 was more power than any reasonable man would ever need. History has shown their claims to be absurd, yet as they say: History repeats itself. Take a man who claims that his Pentium 667 is "faster than I'll ever need" and give him a P4 2.2 to use for a week. Put him back on his 667. 9 times out of 10 he'll be on the phone to Dell to upgrade his PC. Most people who claim that they don't need better say so because they've never SEEN better.
Additionally, try doing some video editing on your PC. While the hard drive is a factor (because massive amounts of data are read and written), the processor is massively more an influence: An Athlon 2200+ will perform the task that much quicker than a Athlon 1500+, again thoroughly reputing your claims that processors are overpowered. That's especially telling as video processing is one of the most disk and memory bound activities.